The Biden administration warned Iran in recent days against launching another attack on Israel and stressed it won't be able to restrain the Israelis, according to a U.S. official and a former Israeli official briefed on the issue."We told the Iranians: We won't be able to hold Israel back, and we won't be able to make sure that the next attack will be calibrated and targeted as the previous one," a U.S. official said.
There is a subtext here that shows that the US has been at least as much of a straitjacket for Israel as an ally.
The US is telling Iran, "We've stopped Israel from attacking you for over a decade now, but we might not be able to stop them the next time."
In other words, the US has been defending Iran - Iran's nuclear program, Iran's sending weapons to Hezbollah, Iran's providing expertise and intelligence and money to Hamas and the Houthis and Iraqi terror groups.
If the US considered Israel to be an ally like NATO countries, it would be telling Iran that an attack on Israel is an attack on the US and the response would be the same. That is far from the message here.
Instead, the Biden administration is saying that the Israelis are crazy and cannot be controlled, so watch out. The US is sending a message that they don't want Israel to attack but it is helpless to stop them.
It isn't like Iran hasn't heard that message before, loud and clear. That's why Iran regularly threatens the US along with Israel, because they know the US is not going to do anything except try to restrain Israel.
This is not a message a superpower that says it is an "ironclad" ally of Israel should be sending.
While this "warning" is better than the previous messages the US sent Iran that they will do everything possible to restrain Israel, it is not a message of strength but of weakness. It is only marginally better than the toothless Biden warning to Iran simply saying "Don't" - a warning that had zero consequences when Iran violated it twice, which itself sent a message of US impotence.
The most charitable interpretation is that the US is saying that Israel can take care of itself and doesn't need US help. But even that message tells the world that the US has been the major factor restraining Israeli actions for years - and the October 7 war proves how foolhardy that position was.
There is another troubling subtext here. The warning was against Iran directly attacking Israel, but the US has not warned Iran at all against attacking Israel in the ways it prefers - through proxies. The US is not advising Iran not to attack Israel through, perhaps, a simultaneous wave of Iraqi drones and Houthi missiles. Iran has not been held responsible for the multifront war that it has been directing for over a year, and the US has bought into the fiction that each attack on Israel is independent and should be countered tactically, not strategically against the people who are behind it all.
Beyond that, Iran sent another message to the world last week - that building a nuclear bomb is definitely on the table - and no one has reported any US warning in response to that. In other words, the US position is that Iran's nuclear program, its support for terror, its direct attacks on Israel, its repression of its own people, are all unrelated and must not be considered linked in any way, nor should they be fought in a coordinated manner of toppling the regime itself.
The US should be leading the battle against Iran's malign intentions, not saying it opposes Israel's acts to defend itself from the world's largest enabler of terrorism.
There is no leadership here. There is no strategy. There is no consistency - except that the US will stand aside and let Iran do almost anything it wants.
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